Local Geographical and Visitor Features
The Gizzen Briggs are sandbars at the entrance to the Dornoch Firth, and with the right wind conditions, they can be heard over a wide area at low tide. The so-called "million dollar view" to the north-west of Tain, accessible via the A836 westward and B9176 Struie moor road, gives a panoramic view of the Dornoch Firth and Sutherland.
There are five important castles in the vicinity - Carbisdale Castle, built for the Dowager Duchess of Sutherland and now a youth hostel; Skibo Castle, once the home of the industrialist Andrew Carnegie and now an exclusive hotel; Dunrobin Castle, ancestral seat of the Duke of Sutherland (castle and gardens open to the public); Balnagown Castle, ancestral seat of the Clan Ross, restored and owned by Mohammed Al Fayed; and Ballone Castle, recently restored by the owners of a local crafts business.
Highland Fine Cheeses, run by Ruaridh Stone (the brother of Liberal MSP Jamie Stone), have a factory at Blarliath Farm, Tain. Tain is also close to Glenmorangie Distillery.
Tain itself features several amenities, such as a library, community centre, two 4-star hotels, a music shop, several fast food outlets, a town hall.
To the southeast of Tain lies the site of the medieval Fearn Abbey, the current parish church of the same name dates from 1772.
Read more about this topic: Tain
Famous quotes containing the words local, geographical, visitor and/or features:
“Eclecticism is the degree zero of contemporary general culture: one listens to reggae, watches a western, eats McDonald’s food for lunch and local cuisine for dinner, wears Paris perfume in Tokyo and “retro” clothes in Hong Kong; knowledge is a matter for TV games. It is easy to find a public for eclectic works.”
—Jean François Lyotard (b. 1924)
“Men’s private self-worlds are rather like our geographical world’s seasons, storm, and sun, deserts, oases, mountains and abysses, the endless-seeming plateaus, darkness and light, and always the sowing and the reaping.”
—Faith Baldwin (1893–1978)
“Beauty is ever to the lonely mind
A shadow fleeting; she is never plain.
She is a visitor who leaves behind
The gift of grief, the souvenir of pain.”
—Robert Nathan (1894–1985)
“The features of our face are hardly more than gestures which force of habit made permanent. Nature, like the destruction of Pompeii, like the metamorphosis of a nymph into a tree, has arrested us in an accustomed movement.”
—Marcel Proust (1871–1922)